Scientists: 100,000 Iraqis have died since war

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Deaths of Iraqis have soared to 100,000 above normal since the
Iraq war, and many victims have been women and children who died
violently, experts from the United States said.

Airstrikes by planes and helicopters by the US-led coalition
have been big killers.

There is no official figure for the number of Iraqis killed
since the conflict began, though some estimates range from 10,000
to 30,000 compared with 1,081 US military deaths.

"Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000
excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of
Iraq," researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public
Health in Baltimore, Maryland said in a report published on the
internet by The Lancet medical journal.

"Violence accounted for most of the excess death and air strikes
from (US-led) coalition forces accounted for the most violent
deaths."

The report's authors concede that some "limited precision" in
their data.

The interviewers were Iraqi, most of them doctors.

The survey was designed and conducted by researchers at Johns
Hopkins University, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya
University in Baghdad.

Airstrikes from coalition forces caused most of the violent
deaths and "most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces
were women and children," they said.

The report was released just days before the US presidential
election.

Lead researcher Les Roberts, from Johns Hopkins, said the
article's timing had been left up to him.

"I emailed it in on September 30 under the condition that it
came out before the election," Roberts said.

"My motive in doing that was not to skew the election. My motive
was that if this came out during the campaign, both candidates
would be forced to pledge to protect civilian lives in Iraq.

"I was opposed to the war and I still think that the war was a
bad idea, but I think that our science has transcended our
perspectives," Roberts said. "As an American, I am really, really
sorry to be reporting this."

Lancet editor Richard Horton wrote in an editorial accompanying
the survey that more household clusters would have improved the
precision of the report, "but at an enormous and unacceptable risk
to the team of interviewers."

"This remarkable piece of work represents the efforts of a
courageous team of scientists," he wrote.

To conduct the survey, investigators visited 33 neighbourhoods
spread evenly across the country in September, randomly selecting
clusters of 30 households to sample. Of the 988 households visited,
808, consisting of 7,868 people, agreed to participate. Each was
asked how many people lived in the home and how many births and
deaths there had been since January 2002.

The scientists then compared death rates in the 15 months before
the invasion with those during the next 18 months. They adjusted
those numbers to account for the different time periods.

Even though the sample size appears small, this type of survey
is considered accurate and acceptable by scientists and was used to
calculate war deaths in Kosovo in the late 1990s.

There were 46 deaths in the surveyed households before the war.
After the invasion, there were 142 deaths. That is an increase from
5 deaths per 1,000 people per year to 12.3 per 1,000 people per
year - more than double.

However, more than a third of the post-invasion deaths were
reported in one cluster of households in the city Fallujah, where
fighting has been most intense recently.

Because the fighting was so severe there, the numbers from that
location may have exaggerated the overall picture.

When the researchers recalculated the effect of the war without
the statistics from Fallujah, the deaths end up at 7.9 per 1,000
people per year - still 1.5 times higher than before the war.

Even with Fallujah factored out, the survey "indicates that the
death toll associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq is
more likely than not about 100,000 people, and may be much higher,"
the report said.

The most common causes of death before the invasion of Iraq were
heart attacks, strokes and other chronic diseases.

After the invasion, violence was recorded as the primary cause
of death and was mainly attributed to coalition forces - with about
95 per cent of those deaths caused by bombs or fire from helicopter
gunships.